REJOICE ON THIS, THE WEEK OF THANKSGIVING, FOR ALICE MUNRO IS OUR QUEEN.
After years of giving us story after story and book after book, the 82-year-old Canadian author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature — only the 13th woman to win it since its inception in 1903. (So you might want to keep moving in this direction, members of the Swedish Academy.)
"I knew I was in the running," said Munro. "But I never thought I would win." Well think again, Ms. Munro!
The author of novels like Dear Life and Dance of the Happy Shades is now the recipiant of about $1.2 million, plus incredible bragging rights. Though Ms. Munro is too classy to brag about things like that.
"I'm particularly glad that winning this award will please so many Canadians," she added. "I'm happy, too, that this will bring more attention to Canadian writing."
Alice Munro, you rule. YOU RULE.
Heralded as the "master of the contemporary short story" while being announced as the winner in Stockholm, Munro said in a 2012 interview with the NY Times that for a long time, she thought "stories were just practice until [she] got time to write a novel."
"Then I found out they were all I could do," she continued. "And so I faced that. I suppose that trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation."
So everybody: if you're not familiar with Alice Munro's work yet, take the rest of the day off and start reading her books immediately.
